Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel LIVE with Ajit George! | Web DM | TTRPG | D&D

[@FlutesLoot]

I appreciated this interview to get more info on the method behind the book. Much more interesting than the "sterile" D&D-approved interviews! :)

[@CitanulsPumpkin]

The best one of those was with the Fiend of Hollowmine writer. They buried the lead, but the elevator pitch for that adventure is a chupacabra hunt during Dia De Los Muertos. That moved the book from "this might be a useful place to steal ideas" to "absolute must buy" for me.

[@walkseva]

Nice interview; never a dull moment. The segue from the Radiant Citadel's backstory/setting info into a wider glance at the philosophy of adventures and settings was interesting.

[@jordanfisher4445]

Great interview! It gave a lot of insight on the book and Jim's contributions from a DM perspective definitely got my imagination going.

[@Blaze-ku6gf]

I want to start DM’ing in the upcoming future and thought I was going to homebrew but this inherently touches on so much I would’ve tried to accentuate in my first game that I might just start here. This interview alone has me enamored with the module honestly.

[@CitanulsPumpkin]

I really like the Keening Gloom as a cosmic horror / skybox sideshow. An old 3e book I read described the deep ethereal as a realm of long forgotten ghostly kingdoms and lost civilizations that no one on the material plane even remembers. I like the idea of the Keening Gloom being the point of no return for that process. When ghosts can manifest in the material plane and the living still remember them and the civilization they came from the echo of that civilization exists in the border ethereal. When the last ghost dies. When no living being remembers the people and cities of a civilization. When even the stones in the foundations have been erased by the sands of time. That is when the ethereal plane's echo of a place that once existed on the material plane falls. Whole cities, nations, and continents drift past the Radiant Citadel and get sucked into the Keening Gloom. Making the Radiant Citadel something like a space station that monitors star systems getting sucked into a super massive black hole.

[@ShotGunner5609]

That's pretty cool!

[@CitanulsPumpkin]

I've already got a framework for a social encounter in the Citadel based on this. There's an observation platform full of oversized binoculars and telescopes like you'd find on top of most sky scrapers or Niagara Falls. At any time of day there's about 10 to 20 Lorehold academics and 50 or so Citadel children. They all play a game where as they watch "forgotten realms" from all across the multiverse drift into the Keening Gloom they call out a guess as to what the civilization was called and what the people of it were like. It's literally impossible to look up info on the civilizations once they get to the point where they're falling into the Keening Gloom, but every now and then a lucky guess is close enough that the falling civilization stops and possibly drifts away from the Keening Gloom. The academics have guessed right about a half dozen times in the last year. The children guess right about once a month. And this one guy named Dave who is a janitor in whatever building the PCs need to sneak into has guessed right 15 times in the last 2 months.

[@2thechase]

Such a great interview full of good tidbits. Both of your passion for and knowledge about the game shines bright. I'm going to strongly pitch my players that the next campaign be centered in the Radiant Citadel.

[@teacup_ninja]

I love it! Thank you to everyone that put this book together, its such a fresh way to approach the game and I'm excited to delve in. :D

[@felixrivera895]

I plan on nodding towards the Radiant Citadel in the later arcs of my Curse of Strahd campaign. It will be the One truly good thing, built off of suspiciously good things. I get the feeling the pcs Won't go to the citadel, since Strahd is Not going to be resolved first, but they will see the message that the suffering they have been through has been Seen. Their struggles are recognized.

[@geoffdewitt6845]

Update: Bought the book based on this conversation, the Alexandrian's Twitter reviews of the adventures, and a 10-minute flip-through of the book. Probably the best $50 I've spent in 5E since Xanathar's.

[@CitanulsPumpkin]

The meat as a luxury item is core to how I plan to introduce new parties to the Radiant Citadel. The party comes to a rural farming community full of all manner of livestock and butcher's shops. It's trade day. The one day a month when an elf carrying 3 large bags of holding and a set of weights and scales comes out of the nearby woods. The elf speaks like Sascha Barren Cohen's character from Talladega Nights the Ballad of Rickey Bobby. He even mentions his "hoosbahn Grigori." The elf sets up his scales and starts pulling out bags of rare, exotic, and super expensive spices. He weighs the cuts of meat the farmers bring him, and gives them an equal weight in whatever spice he has. If you don't know how this might be a great deal for the farmers go to your grocery store with a calculator. Look at the price for a pound of pork and then calculate how much a full pound of saffron would cost you. The party catches the elf's eye so he brings them home to meet Greg, the orc who runs the Citadel meat market. Then they are introduced to a neighbor and set onto the salted legacy quest or whatever other entry point quest I need.

[@shawngifford]

I’ve been very hyped about Radiant Citadel and have WebDM, SlyFlourish, D&D Beyond, and Teos Merwin to thank the most for it. 👍

[@sanjeevshah168]

I love this guy!

[@pwnyboy9714]

God damn, did you just sell me on a book I was gonna skip?

[@geoffdewitt6845]

Not alone in that reaction!

[@CthonicSoulChicken]

If you want to play in a far-left dystopia, sure.

[@pwnyboy9714]

@@CthonicSoulChicken Brother I'm living in a far-right one now. Why are you coming at me with this shit take? 😂

[@geoffdewitt6845]

@@CthonicSoulChicken I think you misheard; he said "fragile Utopia." There aren't any dystopic elements here.

[@CthonicSoulChicken]

@@pwnyboy9714 You are? Holy shit--where is this magical promised land?!

[@sheabreean1984]

PЯӨMӨƧM 😄

[@geoffdewitt6845]

So I have a few thoughts on this talk. Firstly, I want to thank Mr. George for the great passion he's bringing to the product. I have not seen the book and cannot comment, but if the measure of his convictions are the measure of his work's quality, it will shine. Secondly, I had not initially planned on buying this product. I figured (based on the initial marketing) that this product was developed by creators of color for gamers of color, and therefore was not for me. I started changing that opinion based on the first chapter drop on D&D Beyond (a very good marketing move by Wizards), but this talk really cemented that should take a good look at this product. Both the energy and thought that Mr. George clearly put into his ideas and the statement that he has "no answers, just questions" really helped sell me on the book. Thirdly, I liked the characterization of a "fragile utopia." That's something that I could use help fleshing out in my worlds, since my tendency is to lean towards realism, rather than hope. Now I'm interested in how we can move that needle toward potential upside. Fourthly, I don't necessarily like the focus on complexity, but I think that is a session zero conversation, and changing incentive structures for leveling. Your players definitely need to be in a "grown-up" headspace to play here, and I think that somewhat limits the Citadel's utility. At the same time, it's good to have a setting in your back pocket for when your players get to that grown-up headspace. Fifthly, I'm glad someone is taking the time to think about tax policies in their fantasy world!* I do not know if Mr. George has any examples of real-world entities that made both high tariffs and high taxes work, but that would be a genuinely fascinating natural experiment to see how it worked in the real world. I'm also thinking that you could base an entire series of adventures around merchants trying to break the Citadel's transport monopoly. Is it a Trade Discal member, acting against the interests of the cartel? Is it a foreign power, attempting to seize economic power for themselves? How does the Citadel react? Do they send in Shieldbearers or Whisperers to cut off that activity? How much blood do they shed for gold? Finally, I don't think Martin's question about "Aragorn's tax policy" makes a lick of sense. Can someone explain that to me? Or point me to the clip? *NB - My degrees are in economics and finance.

[@CitanulsPumpkin]

There's a lot of stuff in lord of the rings that is over developed and fleshed out and a lot that is either under developed or not touched on at all. Most of that is due to the fact Tolkien was a linguist and not an economist or historian. His focus in all his world building was aimed directly at flowery prose and the cultural implications of how the people named the things and places they lived around. All the focus is on the titles held by the nobility and not the day to day work of the nobility. Brennan Lee Mulligan brought this up on the DM roundtable video over on the Critical Role channel. What's it like to be a blacksmith in Middle Earth and knowing for a fact that some elf made the best sword that will ever and can ever be made 5,000 years ago? That nothing you make will compare. Where did the magic to forge the dozen or so rings of power come from? "Yeah, shit was dope back then. Now? Not so much." Yeah Aragorn is the hero and rightful king. He's also a drifter that spent the last 30 years living in the woods on the outskirts of the most remote human settlements. Is he going to revolutionize industry and commerce? Or is he going to hand off most of his day to day kingdom running to the assistants of the former reagent's cousin?

[@geoffdewitt6845]

@@CitanulsPumpkin Tax collection wasn't a day-to-day function of medieval nobility; that's why the question doesn't make sense to me. It was certainly a major concern of modern / early modern monarchs, but not medieval ones. Aragorn's lands are held in trust for him (enfeoffed) by vassals who will administer them for him...because he can't. Asking Aragorn what his tax policies are is like asking a drowning man to make a rope. Yes, eventually the rope will help, but not in time to help him survive.

[@valibrave]

Sure, I don’t believe it’s as much actual tax policy but just sorta administration and politics in general, Aragon spent his whole life being borderline a hobo and them he’s suddenly made king and is presumably expected to lead the kingdom and fulfil all the attributes of a king. The idea being that classic fantasy heroes who marry the princess after slaying the dragon are good at slaying dragons not at being kings and maybe after they defeat the armies of darkness they don’t live happily ever after but sink their country into poverty, disease, and civil war

[@VinStJohn]

@@geoffdewitt6845 and yet the Lord of the rings does not mention whether aragorns Kingdom functions more like a medieval Kingdom or more like one that might collect taxes. This is the whole point. We don't really know much about the power structures and how they affect the people in the world. Martin wanted to tell a fantasy story that was about that stuff.

[@geoffdewitt6845]

@@valibrave Except Aragorn didn't spend 60 years being a hobo. He spent at least 40 years (if I recall correctly) under the tutelage of Elrond and Gandalf, learning a pretty wide variety of skills. He's not just some weird survivalist; he's a literal warrior-poet. After that, he spent time ranging into Mordor, and riding to war at the side of literal kings, where he got a great hands-on education in how kings act and why they do what they do. Aragorn had a wide grounding in many of the skills of kingship, not to mention the counsel of the wisest Maiar for several years BEFORE the Last Ship departed Middle-Earth. So if that's the question Martin wanted to answer, his Aragorn-analogue is garbage. As to your question about whether it takes a strong warrior to be a good king, I think a better analogue would have been the juxtaposition of Charles V vs Jean le Bel (Jean II), both of France during the Hundred Years' War, rather than the model of Richard III of England during the War of the Roses.

[@DungeonsNDreadnoughts]

Gonna have to pass.

[@itsyagirlVofficial]

5e's not for me, always a good idea to think about the economics of your game worlds. A jit George is misguided in their endeavor to be involved with political systems, the systems are designed to proliferate and grow into the cold monster the Nietzsche spoke of.

[@WarpKL]

I don't recommend this book, Many of the adventures are railroaded to hell .

[@blackmoosev6833]

My god a lot of elitist red flags..."treating gamers like adults....raising games to the next level...making sure the bro isn't really so bro-y and is actually a cool gamer...?" Let me go back and watch that all again to make sure my takes aren't so "cynical" as they seem.

[@dungeonmaster3198]

What?

[@blackmoosev6833]

@@dungeonmaster3198 i mean a lot of what I heard sounds like elitist positioning. So this is the "adult table" of d&d where you are free to be a vegetarian etc, etc....or luxuriate in red blooded flesh like a true "bourgeoisie". You know who aren't bourgeois and ate meat as their regular diets?....Indigenous Americans (just a side note).

[@blackmoosev6833]

not 100% sure, but likely no. I'm not so sure what that has to do with vegan gaming (or vegan gamers) but I guess this falls in line with the way things get contorted these days. "I'm sorry I just cannot play with the ranger because he doesn't need to hunt, he's just doing it to sell the skins. It makes me unconfortable." lol...."Can we play in a vegan setting where we can safely look down on omnivores collectively and ban them from our table?"

[@blackmoosev6833]

@@jacobbutts6109 actually this might depend where you fall on the historical timeline, because with the advancement of colonial power many Indigenous people probably became more and more involved in the fur, cattle, tannery and slaughterhouse processing industries....which are closely related in many ways. And of course finally these days yes many Indigenous people contribute their money to the meat/factory farming industries like any other citizen.

[@ryanduddleson1806]

The “bro” story is an example of how someone who is an outsider usually has to earn the trust of new people. Most modules tend to assume that people will generally accept adventurers - this one sounds like there’s a bit more to the NPCs if a group wants to play that kind of game. To me his comparison between Aragorn and Robert Baratheon is a good example of “taking a game up a notch” - GoT is more complex and morally gray than LoTR. Theres nothing wrong with liking either one- they’re simply different - Martin is much more concerned about the trade of luxury goods than Tolkien. And he’s clear that players can take as much or as little as they want.

[@CthonicSoulChicken]

Have fun playing in a far-left dystopia. This is easily the most overt, politically driven piece of shit WOTC has created yet. The mental gymnastics being used to justify this book are unreal. If you want to explore REAL planescape, check out the 2nd edition product. Nice art can't mask the turd this product is.

[@CitanulsPumpkin]

Don't worry bruh. NuTSR has you covered. Go look up the PC races leaked for their Star Frontiers reboot. You'll love them.